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‘If only I had known this was going to happen, I’d have had a word with Donald Trump,’ says Dilip Jajodia. ‘Please don’t attack anybody before the cricket season starts!’
As owner of the company that makes Dukes cricket balls, Jajodia has grown accustomed to headaches – from supply chains affected by Brexit and Covid to last summer’s complaints by English and Indian Test stars striving for wickets on lifeless pitches.
But the war in the Middle East has added unprecedented levels of complexity, disrupting the passage of the balls from the subcontinent via the Gulf to the UK, and tripling the prices charged by airlines to carry them.
The upshot is what Jajodia calls a ‘major crisis’ in supplying the balls used for England’s home Tests and the County Championship, with the 18 first-class clubs set to start the new season on April 3 with roughly half the number they would normally expect at this time of year.
Dukes, who first began producing balls in 1760 in Pensbury, Kent and now supply every ball used in Test cricket in England, the West Indies and Ireland, import somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 each summer into the professional game in England. Throw in the ECB’s Premier League system, and the number is even higher.
But the life of a Dukes ball is itinerant – vulnerably so, it turns out – and the chain of production complicated. Only once the British cow hides used to make them have undergone a tanning process in Chesterfield is the leather sent to South Asia, where the pieces are painstakingly stitched together by individual tradesmen. The finished balls are then flown back to Britain, ready for use.
Everything needs to run like clockwork – and the chaotic fallout from the American-Israeli assault on Iran has placed a giant spanner in the machinery, with one ECB official admitting: ‘It’s been a bit of a wake-up call for everybody.’
Jajodia, an 80-something former pension fund manager who in 1987 bought British Cricket Balls Ltd, the company who manufacture Dukes, tells Daily Mail Sport: ‘We’ve got a major crisis right now with this bloody Gulf War nonsense. We’ve got to ration clubs by giving them 50 per cent of their balls at the start of the season, and then manage the problem.
‘We’ve got plenty of stuff in the factories in the subcontinent ready to go, but the airlines are not taking the freight, because there’s a logjam.
‘The rates have gone up too. A box of 120 cricket balls would be charged normally by airlines at about $5 a kilo. The last quote I got was $15 a kilo. Most of the stuff goes through the Middle East, but if you’ve suddenly got rockets flying around, you’ve got a major problem.’
Jajodia would rather not contemplate the doomsday scenario, in which English cricket runs out of balls altogether – not least after the counties voted to end the short-lived experiment with the Australian Kookaburra. Instead, his company are absorbing the extra costs, and frantically looking for different routes out of the subcontinent.
‘I heard the other day somebody flew something from Pakistan to Sri Lanka, which is another route out,’ he says. ‘Human beings will find ways. It might well be very expensive, but you’ve got to find a way to do it. Eventually, the couriers might have to charter flights.’
Meanwhile, Jajodia insists the difficulties which led to the Dukes balls being changed constantly during the first half of the series against India last year have been resolved, and is confident there will be fewer grumbles when England take on New Zealand and Pakistan this summer.
He is reluctant to give away the tricks of his trade: the world of cricket-ball manufacturing is small and competitive. But he does reveal that balls were going out of shape because the core, traditionally made of cork and string, was too loose, and set about addressing the matter.
‘I can’t say too much, because we have a secret substance that we use to set the centre of the ball so that it doesn’t move around when it’s whacked,’ he says. ‘We honed in on one way to do it, which solved the problem.’
As a result, he says, the ball was changed only once between the second half of the third Test at Lord’s and the end of the five-match series.
Nothing is guaranteed: the success or otherwise of a cricket ball can depend on anything from the quality of the leather (Jajodia prefers Aberdeen Angus cattle reared in Scotland) to the assiduousness of the stitching done thousands of miles away. It is an inexact science, and pleasing everyone is a challenge.
But Neil Snowball, the ECB’s managing director of competitions and major events, said: ‘As a major customer of Dukes, we have regular engagement before, during and at the end of each season, and last year was the same. We shared our feedback and are confident the 2026 batch will be of the standard we expect.’
The ECB have also dealt with another problem, which stemmed from the practice of leaving host venues to replace out-of-shape balls during Test matches with balls of similar wear and tear.
The situation came to a head during the Lord’s Test against India, when officials realised they had run out of appropriate replacements. On the first day, they had to ask for extra supplies from the Oval; on the second, they were borrowing balls from England assistant coach Marcus Trescothick’s kitbag. The situation was unsustainable, and MCC pushed for a solution.
Now, an ECB official will be tasked with ensuring each Test venue has a selection of different-aged balls, ready for use at a moment’s notice – assuming, of course, there will be enough to go around.